Ancient Literature Discussion (History, Myth, Philosophy &c.)

[Skull]

Question about Arthurian canon

Well, there's your first problem for a start.

but is Pellinore a casual rapist regardless of who's writing him, or was that more of a Mallory thing only,

Pellinore has nothing to do with Sir Tor in Pre-Vulgate of whom his father is instead King Aries. It is only in the Post-Vulgate that Tor is suddenly made another one of Pellinore's illegitimate children and if I'm not mistaken it was Mallory only who added the whole "Pellinore begot with the maiden Vayshoure half by force" (make of that what you will).

since Mallory himself was probably a convicted rapist?

Wow, how slanderous.

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Cool, thanks for answering all that.

[Ideofago]

That's Limbo, not Mambo or Conga and it's from Trinidad not Hawaii lol.

Also didn't know that's not from Hawaii, nor did I know Trinidad existed. Thanks for fixing my joke.

[Dullahan]

read the Tale of Genji. That is all good bye

[Five_X]

Seidensticker, I assume?

[LegalLoliLover]

When Wukong first got the cursed circlet, he tried to kill Sanzang out of anger, directly, and was of course stopped by the curse, but that curse only works if Sanzang actually chants AKA if Wukong really want to get Sanzang back for that, the more efficient way to kill him in his sleep. Forsake Sanzang, and join another Buddhist monk, like Taira no Kiyomori... OK, that last part was just Warriors Orochi, though.

[LegalLoliLover]

As you know, Gilgamesh not only refused Ishtar's offering but did so as rudely as possible, as if to try to offend her on purpose. Now, if that was the intent, wouldn't it have been more efficient to have a one-night stand and then cast her out anyway?

[LegalLoliLover]

Coming from all the half-demon heroes, such as Dante, Alucard, InuYasha, it's jarring as fuck to see the Pilgrims to the West straight up murder, in cold blood, Yellow Robe Demon's half-demon children and the author treating it like a positive. And you wonder why I typically side with the Demon King?

[Five_X]

Why on Earth is it jarring that a 16th century novel is different from a late 20th century video game?

[Mattias]

Wait, it's that young?

[LegalLoliLover]

Like with 3 Kingdoms, the question is, are you talking about the historical event or the novel written several centuries after that event?

[Five_X]

Wait, it's that young?

The novel itself is, though like Romance of the Three Kingdoms there was a rich textual and cultural basis for it that pre-dates the formal book. At least with Journey you can make an onomastic distinction between Sanzang the novel character and Xuanzang the 7th century monk.

[Castellan]

So, fair warning, this is maybe me being a bit self-indulgent, but I thought I'd lay out some interesting bits from having recently done a read through some of the seminal texts of the Ulster Cycle.

It's worth noting that almost nobody has read the entirety of the Ulster Cycle. There are hundreds of texts in the corpus and most of them exist only in their original version, in a version of the Irish language so old even modern speakers have no clue what it means. And, ultimately, the Ulster Cycle is a category made up by modern scholars to refer to a body of work that spans hundreds of years of literary development from the very earliest texts dating to somewhere around the 9th century to the latest texts as late as the 16th century. It's an absolutely massive body of work.

That said, I think the key text to understanding the themes of the Ulster Cycle beyond, of course, the Táin Bó Cúailnge is Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, 'The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel.' This is one of the oldest texts in the saga corpus (some parts may go back as far as the 8th century), and concerns the death of Conare Mór, the High King of Ireland, during a siege of the titular hostel. In a lot of ways, his death sets the stage for the brutal infighting between Ulster, Connacht and Munster that informs most of the Ulster Cycle. But in order to explain that, we have to go to the Mythological Cycle for a bit of context.

Namely, we need to establish that the Túatha Dé Danann are bastards. With a modern eye, a lot of mythological figures from the past come across as not being especially great. The Greek gods get a lot of this, especially when looked at through the eyes of more distant authors like Ovid, but the modern-day tendency is to depict them as scheming, shallow bastards who see humanity as nothing more than disposable pawns for their own entertainment. That's probably not actually how the people of Classical Greece saw them, though. The past is a different country, and they saw things differently. This is not the case with the Túatha Dé Danann. Even by the standards of the Irish people, the Túatha Dé Danann are scheming, disorganized, infighting upper-class twits. They're the 1% if you gave them superpowers. They're not really 'gods' in the traditional sense. The original name used for them, Túatha Dé, can best be translated as 'The God-Like Peoples,' and that sums them up much better than 'Peoples of the Goddess Danu.' They're shadows of fragments of Irish gods (and probably some wholly invented ones) cast into the role of cruel stewards of the island until the coming of the Mílisians.

Because that's the other thing - the Irish were doing deicide before Kratos made it cool. The Book of Invasions, one of the core works of the Mythological Cycle, depicts a series of invasions by mythological peoples that ends with the Sons of Míl, a group of perfectly ordinary humans, who land on Ireland and through magic poetry so incomprehensible we still can't make heads or tails of it today, they defy the magics of these god-like beings and fight them in a series of wars that eventually force the Túatha Dé Danann to sign a peace deal. The humans will keep the surface of Ireland, while the Túatha Dé Danann and their kin can live in the Otherworld below. And they hate this arrangement. The Túatha Dé Danann hate all mankind, but they hate the Mílisians (and by extension the Irish) the most, because they forced them off the Best Island Ever to live below it like squatters. So, what do you get when you have a group of pissed off divine beings living beneath the earth and just waiting for a chance to get back at the people on top? Easy. You give the people on the surface a King.

Kingship in Ireland is weird. Not only are there different 'tiers' of King, with the lowest effectively being 'mayor,' but the concept of Kingship and the values therein are baked into the land itself. To be a true King is to command the island to be at peace. To be a true King is to command the weather so that no rain falls on Ireland (it rains an average of 265 days a year). To be a true King is to be so just and noble and good that the island itself becomes peaceful and kind. This is the kind of High King Conare Mór was. A true, honest, just, and good King. Except he was set up to fail from the beginning. He was born with a dozen geis, a dozen prohibitions on his actions, and he had broken the first one (hunting birds) before he even knew he was bound by these. Before he had even taken the throne, his father, one of the Túatha Dé Danann, had set him up to fail, and his reign ends in fire and blood, with only a single survivor of the King's party making his way home after the bloodbath (Cú Chulainn's cousin Conall Cernach.)

The sacral kingship is broken. There is no High King. Someone sits on the throne in Tara, but he is a High King in name only, because the provincial kings begin to scheme. Conchobar Mac Ness of Ulster schemes to enrich himself, because Conchobar is the worst. Medb schemes revenge on Conchobar for his humiliations. Both of them begin to amass armies, not only of mortal men, but of "heroes." There is no word for "Hero" in the Irish sagas, but there is a group of people, given extraordinary training by faraway trainers who can perform impossible feats. They can kill three hundred men with one blow. They can leap over fortress walls. They can kill a man by throwing an apple so hard it caves in another man's skull. They are trained from childhood to be killers the likes of which no ordinary person can even hope to surpass. And without a High King, these heroes have no fetters. The only rule of the land is violence, and whoever can amass the most (and the deadliest) heroes is set...until those heroes inevitably get their own ideas, or until their duels for honor and status have bled them all white.

The Ulster Cycle does not end in victory for anyone. By the end of it, Medb, Cú Chulainn, Fergus mac Roich, Conchobar mac Ness, Ailil, Laeg, Cú Roi mac Daire, Lugaid mac Cú Coi and many, many others are all dead, their kingdoms in ruin or close to collapse, their life's blood spent in campaigns that, ultimately, accomplished nothing. An orgy of violence brought about by a generation of self-centered ego-tripping super warriors whose only means to gain status and honor was inflicting violence on others. Cú Chulainn may be the 'best' of them, but he's no hero. He cheats when he can't win under the fair rules of a duel, he threatens violence on those who can't defend themselves, he violates multiple women over the course of the sagas, and commits the worst kind of kinslaying by murdering his own son even when his wife (who isn't even the mother of the child) pleads with him to see reason and stop thinking about his stupid warrior's honor for just a minute when he always seems to drop it whenever it's convenient anyway.

The Ulster Cycle is the story of how the greed of kings burned the world while the gods look at the chaos they created and have a grand old time.

[LegalLoliLover]

I feel like that's all gods. Some stories just directly say it. Like in Journey to the West, sure, the demons might have wanted to eat any monk, but clearly, someone leaked the rumor that Sanzang's meat specifically could provide immortality. The gods who "guided" Sanzang on his journey are about as trustworthy as Vampire the Masquerade's LaCroix (who leaked the culprit of the warehouse bombing). Worse, in fact. Given that most of those demons would have probably been either benign or not bothered risking the wrath of Wukong for any random monk meat, it was only be goaded about the "special qualities" of Sanzang's meat that they bothered risking their own lives.

[Ideofago]

Very interesting, nice read. Thank you.

[SpoonyViking]

The Ulster Cycle is the story of how the greed of kings burned the world while the gods look at the chaos they created and have a grand old time.

Interesting! I haven't read the entire cycle, but I've described the Táin as a grandiose slaughter which only happens because of petty reasons all around. Interesting to see that description can apparently be applied to the whole cycle.

[Castellan]

As a coda to this I wanted to talk a little bit about two of the Cycle's central characters. You already know one of them, he's been with this franchise since its beginning, but hopefully you'll learn some new things about him along the way:

Cú Chulainn

Firstly, the "Hound of Ulster" title that is often used for Cú Chulainn is very modern. It has its roots in the 19th century as the culture differences (largely artificially inflated by the British government) between Ulster and the other four provinces became more pronounced. He does have several titles in the text, but none of them refer to Ulster by name. The closest we get is the "Slaughter-hound of Emain," referring to Emain Macha, the fortress from which Conchobar mac Ness reigns over Ulster. My personal favorite of these is the "builder of the Badb's fold with walls of human bodies," which is terrifyingly literal in that Cú Chulainn, in an absolute burning rage, builds a wall made of human corpses in order to keep Medb's remaining army inside the wall so they can't escape him.

It's interesting that Fate chose to make him a relatively sedate and 'laid back' character who just has a bit of a competitive streak because Cú Chulainn is very heavily inspired by Achilles (albeit filtered through the cultural perceptions of the Irish), and his wrath is one of his most defining traits, especially when he's young. When he first arrives back in Emain Macha with his fiancé Emer, habitual shit-stirrer Briucu says "hey isn't there a law saying Conchobar has to sleep with every newlywed bride?" Sure enough, the minute Cú Chulainn hears this he starts to vibrate angrily in place so hard he shatters the rock he's sitting on. His anger is a recurring motif, although another trait that defines him is that, by the standards of medieval Ireland, he is decidedly unmanly.

Now, that seems weird for someone who usually murders six people before breakfast, but it doesn't really have anything to do with his accomplishments as a warrior, it has to do with the fact that he's a twink. Medb describes him on a couple of occasions as (paraphrasing) someone who looks like a twelve year old girl, and while some of it is his youth at the time (he's 17), this description doesn't really fundamentally change later. He's short, looks kind of effeminate and, worst of all his crimes against manliness, can't grow a beard. There's a very amusing section in the Táin where a man refuses to fight him because he doesn't have a beard and so he can't prove he's a warrior, so Cú Chulainn has to fudge it by having his long-suffering charioteer Laeg glue some grass to his face so it looks like he has a beard. It might tie into why he's always so desperate to prove that he is in fact King of Ass-Kick Mountain. Also note that none of this necessarily makes him less attractive - the whole reason he goes off to train with Scáthach is a long chain of events that starts with the men of Ulster going 'he's going to start seducing all our wives if we leave him unmarried.' So they try to set him up with Emer, but Emer's father refuses to have a twinky murdergremlin for a son-in-law so he tries to get Cú Chulainn killed by sending him off to get trained by Scáthach. Meanwhile, Emer gives Cú Chulainn a very specific set of challenges to overcome if he hopes to marry her that very specifically map to the perfect way for him to 'abduct' her from her father without killing any of her other relatives, because Emer is smart like that.

Side note: Scáthach doesn't take up very much narrative space in the Ulster Cycle, she's pretty much just in Tochmarc Émire as the operator of a Murder School for Children where the graduation ceremony is a war against the other Murder School for Children and the survivors graduate. Outside of that, her only real role is putting a geis on all her students to avoid them fighting each other...which all of them break when they join Medb in trying to kill Cú Chulainn during the Táin.

The last thing is that it's interesting that later versions make the Táin out to be a martyrdom victory for Cú Chulainn when the reality is that he loses. Medb got the bull, and while most of her army turned into mincemeat, it was still a Pyrrhic victory over Ulster. Cú Chulainn, meanwhile, had to watch not only the boy-troop of Emain Macha (an assembly of 150 noblemen's sons that he was the patron of) die in his place while Lugh gave him a healing powernap, but also had to kill his foster-brother (and boyfriend, don't @ me) Ferdiad in single combat. At the end of the Táin, Cú Chulainn has lost his son and his foster-brother, he's lost the boy-troop, and while he's still alive, it's a deeply melancholy experience all around. Besides, the sons and daughters of all the people he murdered here are eventually going to come back to collect.

Which brings us to his death, which I'm highlighting here for two reasons. One, it didn't happen at the end of the Táin. That's a modern retelling that tries to make Cú Chulainn into a young martyr for the cause of freedom (gee, I wonder why 19th century revolutionaries would find that appealing). It happens about 10-15 years later, when the sons of two of Cú Chulainn's enemies make a common cause with Medb to get rid of him. It basically plays out like an MMO raid. You have the tanks (an army of Connacht warriors who are just there to get murdered), the healers (a cabal of sorcerers whose father Cú Chulainn killed), three people doing the mechanics (three satirists who are supposed to get Cú Chulainn's spears) and two damage-dealers with very specific jobs (Lugaid mac Cú Roi and Erc mac Cairpri, the sons of the king of Munster and Tara respectively). The satirists get the spears, usually dying in the process, the sorcerers enchant the spears so that when thrown, they will kill a King, and Erc and Lugaid take turns throwing them. The first one kills Cú Chulainn's charioteer Laeg (a king among charioteers and also a prince himself), the second kills Cú Chulainn's horse Liath Macha (a king among horses), and the third impales Cú Chulainn, although he doesn't immediately die. In fact, when Lugaid goes to take his head to prove he's killed him, Cú Chulainn's sword arm falls down and cuts off Lugaid's arm. Even in death, the Slaughter-hound of Emain knows only violence.

Oh, and no discussion of Cú Chulainn would be complete without a mention of that time Briucu (again, notorious shit-stirrer) prevented Emer from walking through the door of his hostel...so Cú Chulainn just tipped half the house over and let her get in through the gap. He might be an asshole, but at least he loves his wife.

Conall Cernach

Conall is weird. We have more texts about Conall than we do about Cú Chulainn, but most of them are fragments or untranslated, and many of them are very old. He seems to have been the main character of the Ulster Cycle in the early days before Cú Chulainn got turbo-popular, but even in the more Cú Chulainn-centered texts he's still there and doing things.

Cú Chulainn failed at the Táin because he's not Conall Cernach. There's a running commentary throughout the Ulster Cycle that where Cú Chulainn is the unstoppable force, Conall is the immovable object. Conall is a border guardian, an enforcer of boundaries, someone who's much more comfortable playing on the defensive where he can control the battlefield. In Togail Bruidne Dá Derga we get a description of Conall holding all seven gates to the hostel, at the same time, by himself. He's the only one who survives, not because he got lucky, but because he's that damned hard to kill. His sword arm is hanging by a thread and his shield-arm has been punctured everywhere by throwing spears after his shield gave in, but he manages to limp out of the hostel afterwards and escape, and makes a full recovery. He survives longer than any other Ulster character, outliving Cú Chulainn, Fergus, and Conchobar mac Ness. About the only character he doesn't outlive is Medb, and even then it's only by a few days.

Conall also plays a very important role as the avenger of Cú Chulainn. He and Cú made a pact that if one of them died, the other one would do whatever it takes to get revenge on the killer. So when he comes back to Ulster after a time collecting 'taxes' in Scotland and hears what's happened, he chases after Lugaid mac Cú Roi on his horse, Dripping-Red-With-Gore. So called because its color makes it look like it's perpetually dripping with the blood of its victims, and given that it's a giant horse with a dog's head that kicks up so much dirt when it furiously thunders over the land that it makes it look like it's being followed by all the ravens in Ireland, I can understand why it got that name. So Conall shows up on his Spooky Murder Horse and challenges the one-armed Lugaid to a duel, even going so far as to tie one of his own arms behind his back to make it a 'fair fight.' Only the horse interferes and eats half of Lugaid's stomach and when he's like "wtf bro I thought it was gonna be a fair fight" Conall reasonably replies "bold of you to assume I can control my giant murder horse." After this, he does a Murder Tour of Ireland to kill every single person involved with Cú Chulainn's death and drags all their heads to the Gardens of Lugh (the home of Cù Chulainn's widow Emer) and offers them to her as a consolation prize.

Conall gets completely forgotten in Ulster Cycle retellings, and it's a shame, because he's a really interesting figure and foil to his more impulsive cousin. Conall is a rock, a reliable anchor for Ulster that allows Cú Chulainn to go on the offensive, and whose undying nature basically lets him watch the entire collapse of Conchobar's kingdom firsthand.

[Bugs]

Very in depth and very insightful, good stuff.

[Ideofago]

This was really good. Also, did Cu and Scathach ever fuck? I remember something about 'friendship of her thighs' or whatnot.

[Castellan]

This was really good. Also, did Cu and Scathach ever fuck? I remember something about 'friendship of her thighs' or whatnot.

Yes, but that phrase was not invoked and also it was, uh. Decidedly not consensual. Uathach, Scáthach's daughter, told Cú Chulainn where Scáthach liked to nap, so he sneaks up on her while she's napping, points a sword at her throat and basically says "a life for three wishes," one of which involves sleeping with him. He later pulls the trick on Aoife (who, it should be noted, is not Scáthach's sister in the original medieval text) using the old "hey look over there" maneuver to distract her and then demanding she 'give him a son' as part of the deal to let her live.

It's another recurring motif with Cú Chulainn - he meets 4/5 of the foremost female warrior-trainers of the world and defeats all of them by cheating, although he doesn't extract any favors from the last two.

The "friendship of the thighs" thing is from the Táin proper, and it's Medb trying to convince one of the heroes in her army to challenge Cú Chulainn to a duel by saying that not only will he get her daughter Finnabair in marriage, but also her own "friendly thighs" on top of the bargain.